Commodities have been heating up this year – especially gold, having just eclipsed two thousand dollars U.S. per ounce – and exploration companies are on the prowl for precious metals.
A leading company in this space –
Alianza Minerals Ltd.(ANZ) (
TSX-V.ANZ,
OTC:TARSF,
Forum) – is focusing its efforts on the discovery of precious metals ore bodies in Yukon Territory, British Columbia, Colorado, Nevada, and Peru. Employing a hybrid business model of joint venture funding and self-funded projects to maximize opportunity for exploration success, ANZ currently holds gold, silver, and base metal operations in these areas, as well as a copper exploration alliance with Cloudbreak Discovery and Allied Copper Corporation for the
Stateline Property in the southwestern U-S. Alianza also recently filed an N-eye 43-101-compliant technical report on its wholly-owned 85-hundred hectare
Haldane Project, located in the Keno Hill silver district in the Yukon.
Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined, once again, by Alianza’s President and CEO, Jason Weber, to get our investor audience up-to-date on the latest news and happenings from this unique metals & mining play.
(CLICK IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: Let’s get our investor audience up to speed on the Keno Hill project, which has seen some outstanding operating results of late.
JW: Yeah, we're really excited and really pleased with the way things have gone over the last 18 months at Haldane, which is our key project in the Keno Hill district. We're adjacent to LCO resources land package, which of course they're mining at their Keno Hill deposits right now. So we're building on an in excess of a hundred-year-old district with we think is a brand-new opportunity for new silver deposits. So it's a really exciting place to be and we're really happy, especially with our west fault results, which we're starting to put together a new vein deposit there. So it's exciting times and of course with the way things have gone up there with not just silver exploration but gold, it's a really exciting place to work.
SH: For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect at Keno Hill and can you give us an update on your drilling program?
JW: Yeah, so this year we're focused on our West Fault, which is our quote unquote new discovery at Haldane right at the end of 2020. We actually announced it just over a year ago when we got the results in early 2021, a new zone at what we call the West Fault, almost nine meters of 311 grams per ton silver with sort of around a percent led and zinc and that was sort of what kicked off exploration at this new target. It was one that we spent all our time on last year, this year we're going to continue to work at West Fault but we don't want to expand. Using some of the knowledge that we've obtained from drilling at West Fault, we want to go test some of the other targets that we've been working on as well, such as Middlecoff, which was actually an area that had seen some underground mining development back in the early 1920s.
So that's sort of one of the benefits of working in this area where we start to understand the geology better now, we're taking that and applying it to some of our other targets like Middlecoff and then Big horn, which was a target we drilled back in 2019 hit a new vein system there and we haven't been back there. So another exciting target that that we'd like to get drilling on this year as well. So we're just in the planning phase right now, securing a drill rig for the coming field seasons program.
SH: Let’s shift to exploration at Haldane. Can you provide some details on recently defined targets in the property’s new areas?
JW: Yeah, certainly West Fault is that sort of key target for us right now. That's whereas I mentioned earlier that we had the great result in early 2021, which we were able to follow up in our summer drill program hitting more high-grade mineralization over wide widths and these are grades and widths that would be mineable at the nearby Keno Hill deposit. So that's really important for us. It's kind of the proof of concept. We had the idea when we took this project on that we could find high grade mineral over significant mineable widths and we're starting to see that at West Fault, we've kind of defined an area that's about a 100 meters by 90 meters in size so far. We've had some fantastic intersections within that 3.14 meters.
That's averaging 1,351 grams per ton silver and that's a true width, 3.14 meters. So a really exciting result and then another hole we had 1100 grams over a meter. There's a wider zone of kind of in the 400 gram per ton silver range. So these are results that are ore grade at the nearby Keno deposits so our goal here is to just keep building on West Fault. It's open, we'll keep following up this mineralization and then as I touched on, we can now take what we're learning here. What we're seeing is that these faults that the veins are hosted in can host multiple veins within them. So you'll see one vein maybe pinch out but then just offset another vein will start up and we're seeing that at West Fault and we think maybe that's what's happening at Middlecoff and maybe explain some of the results we had there.
So we're going to take that knowledge back. We'd like to do some more drilling there and then three kilometers away on a parallel vein system at Bighorn we had our very first drill hole there, a target we defined from soil geo chemical work and prospecting again another proof of concept for us that where when we looked at this project, we've got the right rocks here. We don't feel they've been adequately explored. Everybody's focused in where the old timers were looking a hundred years ago. There's potential for more parallel vein systems and I think that's what we found at Bighorn. So that would be another area of drilling for us this year. So it's an odd scenario really in that we're in a known silver district, it's been in production for over a hundred years yet we're on drill hole number 29 from surface. So it really is under explored and I think while we're in this active district, our project still is very early stage and I think that's really some of the upside for investors here is as we start to put a deposit together, that's where we're really going to see the appreciation in our share price.
SH: Alianza employs a hybrid business model of joint venture funding and self-funded projects. Jason, can you walk us through how this maximizes opportunity for exploration success?
JW: Dave, I love to talk about this. We know that discoveries are so rare in our business and that's really where the value comes for a company like ours. We can talk about the metal prices right now all we want but the truth is until we have a discovery, until we have a deposit, there's nothing for investors to pin the value on. There's no metal deposit there that people can say, okay, there's 50 million tons at this grade that we can apply a value to. So for our us, it's about making that discovery and because it's so difficult, we really want to maximize the number of opportunities to make that discovery. So one is having good projects. The second part of that is getting as many of those projects underway as you can concurrently and with us being a small company, we don't have the resources people wise or financially to do it all ourselves. So we look for partners who can bring in that financial component to fund those programs but also some expertise, there's areas of exploration that other groups have a particular expertise we may not have.
They might know an area better than even we do. So we can draw upon that. So having Halden as the wholly owned project that we control, we control the news flow, when programs go ahead, what targets we're going to drill in what order, that gives us one project that we can really push and then we have these other great projects in the background too, that our partners are funding and in some cases, our partners even operating where we get them to the drill phase and we could have a discovery on one of those projects as well.
So it really gives us a number of opportunities to be involved in the discovery and if things work out the way we hope this year, we'll see four projects being drilled, three funded by partners, two of those operated by us with the helpless and great teams that we have access to and then one operated by our partner Coeur and then of course us funding and driving the work at Haldane. So it's really about creating as many discovery opportunities as we can and we feel this hybrid model really accomplishes that nicely for us.
SH: Let’s look at your joint acquisition option agreement with Cloud-Break Discovery and Allied Copper Corp for the Stateline Property. What are the details of this and what are the expectations?
JW: I love to talk about these projects. There's actually two projects in Colorado state line, which you just mentioned then another one that we have an agreement with both Cloud-Break and Allied called Klondike, which we did just at the end of 2021 December. What's fascinating about these projects is that they're in the same rocks that our twin canyon gold project is in Southwest Colorado. They're located in those same rocks and there's some really unique aspects to the mineralization at twin canyon that looks like it's somewhat associated with petroleum deposits. So we started looking at the characteristics of some of this mineralization and saw that there was copper projects with the same attributes. So we started looking through the belt at some of the other opportunities that might be out there and Klondike and Stateline were there. At the same time, we were talking with the Cloud-Break group, doing stuff with the and they were really interested in copper.
So we said, well because these are different, they're kind of new. Not many people are looking for these styles of deposits. Let's work together on these. We can move them forward, look for partners together and we did that and we're able to secure Allied as a partner on the two projects that we picked up that being Klondike and Stateline. So it's a really neat sort of collaboration between ourselves and the Cloud-Break team and then together we were able to bring in Allied to fund ongoing exploration and drilling. So with the agreements that we've signed with Allied, everything split 50 50 with Cloud-Break on Klondike, for example, Allied committed to earn a hundred percent on the project. They'll have to spend 4.75 million Canadian in exploration over four years.
They'll issue somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 million shares, plus 3 million warrants over that period to the two companies that will split and then pay us about $400,000 stage cash payments. What's the expectation, it's really that we get to drilling some of the targets that we've identified there and we've been very fortunate to find some new copper showings on surface that look really, really interesting and those will be prime targets for that next drill phase or even the initial drill phase. For Stateline, that agreement was just announced in January. This one is exciting. Doesn't have as much to see on surface. It's not as advanced, hasn't had as much work previously as Klondike but it's eight kilometers from an active copper mine, mining copper deposits in the same rocks and we've got the extension to that ground, which is the LIBO Valley Copper Mine, which sits just on the Utah side of the border right near (us).
So Stateline is called Stateline because the property straddles, the Utah, Colorado state border and so at Stateline, similar type agreement in this agreement, they'll spend 3.75 million in exploration over four years. We'll get 4.25 million shares that gets split between the two companies and again, it's to get to drilling for fairly quickly. There's some remote sensing that we'll do some worldview three surveys that we'll do at both projects here as soon as the snow's off the ground there and then the rest is permitting and, and setting up for drilling the summer. There's a minimum $500,000 work requirement on both projects for this year but the Allied group's pretty aggressive. I think they'll move these projects to drilling as fast as they can and we're fully supportive of that.
SH: There must some advantages to working in the Keno District. Can you share some of these of this with us?
JW: Yeah, certainly. When you're in an active mining district like this, I'd been up in the Mayo Keno area before back when the mines weren't, they were shut down because of the silver prices and it was a pretty quiet place to be now in mid-December you are driving the road out to Keno and you're seeing trucks passing all the time and it's cruise upgrading the power lines that feed the mines in the area, which there are two now, Keno mining, the traditional Keno deposits and then just to the north there's the Eagle Gold mine, which went into production a couple years ago. So you've got cruise servicing those projects, plus all the active exploration there's four or five junior companies that are working in some cases almost year-round in the district.
So you have access to equipment. We had a down hole test tool fail on us. We called up our neighbors and they were able to lend us there’s. So you get that kind of collaboration and that extends even into the geology. We have a great relationship with the two companies that are adjacent to us, Banning Gold, who's exploring a different level of the stratigraphy than we are and then of course, LCO who's deposits, that's the rocks we're exploring in the Keno hill court site Basal Quartzite that they're so very familiar with and we have a great relationship with their field crews. We ask geological questions of them all the time. We've toured them on our project and they've been a great support, great help for us. So it's some of the unseen aspects of working in a district like this, just the collaboration and the camaraderie that you get from a bunch of different groups, all trying to accomplish the same thing and even though we're in competition there is certainly a very strong level of working together. It's been great for us. It's been very helpful.
SH: The Company looks set for strong growth in 2022. How are you placed to expand operations to meet demand?
JW: Well, the demands really are put on by us, the management team and our shareholders. It is get as much exploration done as we can on as many projects as we can and so. We're a relatively small group but we have some great teams that we have access to and to help manage both our US and Canadian projects. We use equity exploration here in Canada to help run the project in Haldane. In fact, they're the underlying vendor of the project. So their geo that's been on it running it for us has been really active on the project since 2007 with some previous juniors that had taken some cursory looks at it. So great corporate you there with having those guys on site and then a similar group in the US called Big Rock Exploration.
I've done lots of work with them in the past and they're helping manage our Colorado projects and have managed our Nevada projects in the past. So we have a great working relationship with them. It allows us to expand crew as we need and it's been really effective in moving our projects forward and probably what I like most about both these groups is they're real boots on the ground old school geologists. They get excited out in the field, banging on rocks, finding new areas of mineralization, unraveling geological problems. So it's lots of fun to work with these guys.
SH: Gold, silver, and copper have all been in focus for investors for their rapid growth potential this year. Given your experience as a geo in the sector, what do you predict for these metals this year?
JW: Oh, man. If I could make an accurate prediction, we'd all be rich but I got to think that coming out of the pandemic inflation has to be an issue for us going forward and I think that is where the precious metals really, they're value is based in that. I think we're going to see and I think we started to see some of that uptick in the precious metals because of these factors. I think the whole political instability around Russia and Ukraine has muddled that a little bit but I think in the end if you ignore the day-to-day rations of the precious metals prices, I think in the end, the pressure is upward. So I do think that we will be in a strong precious metals market going forward but I also look at these things from the perspective above just the exploration side.
We're not finding deposits the same way we used to and this for the precious metals but also for copper, which as we recover out of the pandemic and demand for electrification, electric vehicles copper's a big component into that and I think the demand for copper is going to be significantly enhanced but I don't think it needs to be driven all that much higher. It's just the fact that we don't find deposits at the rate we used to, I think the copper supply, the new deposits that are found and how long it takes them to get online, I think is big a factor as any. So I think that for the commodities that we explore for I think the future looks good and that being copper, silver and gold.
So I expect that we would see some inflation in those prices going forward but again, those provide the backdrop for our exploration finding partners. Obviously if copper's strong, it's easier to find partners to fund copper projects but really the key for us is making that discovery and of course, if metal prices are strong the amplitude on the uptick in our share price will be that much higher on a discovery. So I think the future looks good but whether it's next month or a year from now we see a bull cycle that we're like, okay, this is it. It's on. I think we're probably already there but the day-to-day movement and the prices, I think muddles that a bit for us.
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management and board teams, along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the gold, silver, and copper exploration space?
JW: I'm really proud of the team that we have put together. On the management side, we're lean but really effective, solid and on the technical side and then paired with a board that's got a great mix of technical people and financial people and I think those that's a recipe that you need to have success in this business. So on the board side, we've got as I said, a good mix. On the financial side, we just added a new director Sven Gollan who represents FruchtExpress, one of our large shareholders based in Europe. Sven’s got a corporate finance background, so a great addition to our group from that perspective and we have Mark Brown, our chairman. Again financial background CA (chartered accountant), he provides that aspect, as my training as a geologist, I don't have that same background.
So you put that together with myself as a geologist, our VP exploration, Rob Duncan is a very, very strong geologist and then on our board, we've also got Marc Blythe, who's a mining engineer, very strong on the geology side but he gives that perspective of, okay, if you find something here, is it likely to be a mine, what are the pitfalls, what are the kind of targets you should be looking for. As geologists, it's easy to fall in love with projects, you have that somebody on the board or close to you who can give you that that sense of perspective for the projects you're exploring. I think that's really, really valuable and then you couple that with both Rob and I. Our love and our expertise really is early-stage exploration but we've both worked on advanced projects. So again, that ability to look at an early-stage project and sort of fall back on what were some of the pitfalls we saw in PAA and feasibility level projects. We can help maybe avoid some of those in the early stages. We're a lean team but it's very balanced and driven and I think it's as I said, a great recipe for success as we move forward with this group.
SH: And finally, Jason, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked the floor is yours.
JW: Well, we've touched on it a bit with the business model, the hybrid joint venture business model but I think really, it's the active exploration portfolio that brings to the table. That means news flow will have news from all these active projects throughout the season and some of these projects we can work late into of the year. So it just extends that news flow and of course that's important for investors, that's what keeps people interested in. Hopefully that news at some point is a discovery. I like the response we've had from our copper exploration, the innovative Alliance we're doing with Cloud-Break in the Southwest US, that's generated a lot of interest for us and I think just having that copper exposure versus just straight precious metals is something that our investors find really exciting.
I think the fact that we're operating in strong mining jurisdictions, Colorado's got a great history of mining, of course, the Keno Hill district and the Yukon's been mining for over a hundred years there with almost 220 million ounces of silver produce. So it's a bit about news flow about where we're working and then the potential for those discoveries. I think as we move into hopefully a much stronger metals market, I think it positions Alianza very well and I think for investors, anybody who's interested, you can follow along with us at www Alianzaminerals.com and social media @Alianzaminerals on Twitter is a great place to get information on what we're doing as we explore these projects that we have in our great portfolio.
To keep up with what’s happening around the company, visit
alianzaminerals.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.